The Half-Baked Pizza.

Last week I said that sales was not performance art, and that we should instead focus on creating great shared sales experiences with our customers. Stop focusing on your presentation and instead on how our meeting is going. And as you engineer your next great shared sales experience, may I suggest what you’ll want to serve?

Skip the elegant meal laid out with care and garnish. Instead, bring a half-baked pizza.

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In the name of service and professional appearance, marketing and sales people all over our industry spend thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars preparing beautifully-detailed Keynote and PowerPoint presentations and binding together gorgeous handout booklets as “leave-behinds.” The fonts are all consistent, the graphics crisp, and the ideas and executions and numbers are all exquisitely explained. This sumptuous spread is laid on the customer’s table with great anticipation and optimism. Then something curious happens:

Nothing. The fully-finished, fully illustrated idea not only doesn’t sell; the customer doesn’t even get particularly engaged in the meeting. So what the hell happened here? And how could it have gone better?

This seller has suffered the unintended consequence of over-presentation. By crafting it all into a finished presentation, she’s sent the customer a subtle but unmistakable message: Look what we built… it’s all done and we think it’s perfect…you can either buy it or not buy it, but it will never truly be yours. Customers don’t want shrink wrapped packages: they want participation. Don’t feed them a meal; take them to a cooking class.

For years I’ve used the metaphor of the half-baked pizza. Show up with a pie that’s not fully cooked and a bag of ingredients. Let the customer add a little pepperoni here, a few peppers there, maybe a little extra cheese. When you let your customer into the creation process just a little, they feel a sense of ownership that can turn an ambivalent buyer into an intensively loyal advocate.

So stop beating up your marketing team because you don’t think you have enough slides. Bring in a blueprint, some wire frames. Show your customer a rough sketch of the house you’d like to build with them and let them move a couple of walls. You just might be amazed at how much more house they’re willing to buy.

Doug “Dream” Weaver, great seeing you on Monday and this is one of your best ever and from a client perspective spot on…the only thing you left out was taking the client to The 21 Club for lunch! Cheers, JV

I don’t like Peppers on my pizza. But I love everything else in this article. My favorite presentation is one that is done on the client’s whiteboard, together with them, as you work as a team to solve their business challenge.
But please, hold the peppers.

If you build your pizza as a solution made from ingredients that you dug up when you studied the client’s marketing objectives and challenges, you might walk in with a messed up pizza but, if you follow Doug’s advice, the client will roll up their sleeves and start showing you how they would make that custom pizza so that is just right for them.

They want to help you because your competitor was just here and they came in with a pizza built from ingredients that were dug up when they looked around their own media company and picked the things that they wanted to sell. That pizza looks gorgeous when you open the box but after one slice, you start thinking about excusing yourself to go to the bathroom.

To add to the HALF baked pizza metaphor, it’s important to provide some direction on how one’s service or product could be used. It is a delicate balance–not too specific and not too general. I’ve seen too many situations where a client is overwhelmed by the “bland canvas.” Deer in headlights, incapable of applying a new concept with a blank canvas to their business needs. It’s critical to show how a client how something could be used without closing the door on the strategic discussion with them about how it should be designed for their unique needs.

At least be able to give some examples of how the big idea might be applied in ways that are relevant.